“It’s just how it goes in those fields…remove all of the negative results, don’t actually report the ridiculous number of fishing expeditions you went on (especially in fMRI research), make it sound like you mostly knew what you were going to find in the first place, make it a nice clean story. When my colleagues (from a well-known, well-respected emotion research lab) were trying to talk me into removing all of the negative results and altering what my original hypothesis was, literally saying “everyone does it…” that was it for me. I had a sinking feeling that everyone did do it that way and that I couldn’t trust the majority of work I had to depend on/reference myself.”

“The “replication crisis” is not at all unique to social psychology, to psychological science, or even to the social sciences. As Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis famously argued almost a decade ago, “Most research findings are false for most research designs and for most fields.” Failures to replicate and other major flaws in published research have since been noted throughout science, including in cancer research, research into the genetics of complex diseases like obesity and heart disease, stem cell research, and studies of the origins of the universe. Earlier this year, the National Institutes of Health stated “The complex system for ensuring the reproducibility of biomedical research is failing and is in need of restructuring.”